Conversation with Mauro Micheli and Sergio Beretta: 40 years of Riva, 31 of Officina Italiana Design and a single great muse: art. Article taken from Nautica Casarola Magazine 2025.

From the Accademia di Brera to the bow of an Aquariva, from art galleries to the 3D modelling room, from the meditative silence of Greece to the plastic power of a 68’ Diable: the creative story of Mauro Micheli and Sergio Beretta, founders of Officina Italiana Design, is the account of a unique design-method, where the artistic gesture and the discipline of design merge to give life to timeless objects. Floating icons that speak the language of creativity.

The beginning of an aesthetic legacy: the school of Gervasoni and Barilani

Mauro Micheli, today considered one of the most recognisable names in global nautical design, joined Riva in 1984.

“I was just over my twenties, and the Sarnico shipyard was looking for a young designer to join the design office. I took part in the selection though I knew nothing about boats or the nautical world… it was Gino Gervasoni who chose me. He was Carlo Riva’s brother-in-law, a man with an unmistakable style. He wanted me in the Riva team and it was a real school, working alongside Giorgio Barilani, the architect who had worked side-by-side with Carlo Riva.

Working next to those who held the fate of such an iconic brand — built of boats emblematic of timeless elegance — meant understanding that every line does not spring from a chance intuition, but from a coherent aesthetic thought. This is where I learned the harmony of volumes, the rhythm between concave and convex surfaces. At Riva I learned respect for proportions, the value of detail and above all the silence of drawing. In that environment I realised that a boat is not drawn to impress, but to last.”

This idea of “stylistic longevity” became the hallmark of Officina Italiana Design, founded in 1994 together with Sergio Beretta, manager and entrepreneurial mind of the studio, but also art-collector and sensitive traveller. Since then, all Riva vessels have originated from Mauro Micheli’s pencil and his team — or rather, from their aesthetic sensibility.

Art, architecture and visual memory: the OID method

Talking with Micheli and Beretta means immersing oneself in a rich and layered cultural universe. Art is a constant presence — not as decoration, but as a conceptual foundation. Micheli (with a diploma from a fine-arts high school and experience at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts) defines himself as an “instinctive rationalist”: “I don’t seek hidden meanings in a work, but what it gives me instantly. I’m struck by hyper-minimalist works where everything is reduced to essence, or those where the artist leaves a strong material sign. It’s a matter of visual equilibrium and emotional tension, which I transfer into the lines of boats.”

Sergio Beretta is of the same opinion, and adds: “Every project begins with an intuition, but is nourished by a baggage formed over time. Exhibitions, architecture, cities, churches, travels. Greece for us is a place of spiritual regeneration, where silence and light bring us back to the original sense of forms.”

From sketch to launch: the anatomy of a Riva project

The creative process inside Officina Italiana Design always starts from the free gesture of hand drawing. “With the pencil I draw the mother-line, the one that already contains the direction of the boat,” explains Mauro Micheli. “It is an almost emotional moment. If it doesn’t work there, it will not work in 3D either.”

From the sketch the process moves to a digital modelling phase, where the stroke confronts hydrodynamics, structural constraints and technical requirements. The team works with CAD software and advanced 3D systems, in constant dialogue with the naval engineers of the Riva yard. “But the form is never sacrificed,” clarifies Beretta. “The challenge is to maintain the aesthetic identity within the industrial requirements. A Riva must be an emotional object and at the same time perfectly functional.”

Every line, every junction between windscreen and hull, every relationship between light and surface is studied as if it were a sculpture. The objective? To achieve that formal synthesis that, as in a work of art, speaks to different sensibilities.

Aquariva: the modern classic that defies time

In 2000 the Aquariva was born, a modern runabout but with classic DNA, entirely signed by Officina Italiana Design. “It is the boat that most represents us,” says Micheli. “We had to reinterpret Riva tradition in a contemporary key. The balance between nostalgia and innovation was extremely delicate. But we succeeded.”

Twenty-five years later, the Aquariva is still in production. “Nothing changed, or almost nothing. And this is the point: a successful design is like an architecture that resists time. It does not need to be updated — it is already complete,” adds Beretta.

Cultural projects, collecting and materials that tell

The love for art has prompted Mauro Micheli and Sergio Beretta to actively support cultural initiatives. From the photographic project B&C×R, with shots by Gabriele Basilico and Mario Cresci that poetically narrate the Riva shipyards, up to the recent support of the artist Davide Allieri, who transformed fibreglass — the nautical material par excellence — into expressive elements for an exhibition first at Palazzo Monti in Brescia and recently at the Triennale di Milan.

“The technical material can become art,” underlines Micheli. “And we live between those two dimensions. We design functional objects but loaded with meaning. And beauty, after all, is precisely that.”

A vision looking ahead

Officina Italiana Design continues its research path within the Ferretti Group, but with full stylistic autonomy. The new lines, such as those of the Rivamare, the 68’ Diable or the 82’ Diva, follow the Riva tradition, yet always with a touch of contemporaneity and plastic essentiality: “two perfect signs and nothing more,” as Micheli says. Because the real difficulty today is to say a lot with little.

And the future? “We would like to dare even more in minimalism,” concludes Beretta. “But we also know that our job is to find that balance between beauty and market, between emotion and function. And to do it always coherently.”